Hot Stamper Note Taking – Here Is What You Need to Know

Basic Concepts and Realities Explained 

Finding Hot Stampers is all about doing shootouts for as many different pressings of the same title as you can lay your hands on, the more the merrier.

The kind of notes we take can be seen below. 4×6 Post-its work great for this purpose, using one per side. We go through thousands of them every year.

Without clear notes on your records about exactly what you heard as you played them — good, bad, or otherwise — you cannot possibly keep track of which pressings have the qualities you were listening for, and to what degree.

Extensive notes like the ones you see below are a must. Here is what I had to say about a copy of Rubber Soul that impressed the hell out of me at the time. It went right into our Top Shelf section (current population: ten). Reviews for more 3/3 pressings we’ve posted to the blog can be found here.

Other reviews with post-its can be found here. (We also make every effort to be very specific about the shortcomings of the audiophile pressings we review, which is why we started to reproduce our notes for their reviews when they are available.)

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The King James Version – What to Listen For

Hot Stamper Pressings of Large Group Jazz Recordings Available Now

Unlike most Direct to Disc recordings, this album actually contains real music worth listening to — but only when the pressing lets the energy of the musicians through, with actual fidelity to the sounds of the real instruments. Brass without bite is boring. Drummers who are too delicate in their drumming will put you to sleep.

Many copies of this album will do exactly that, which is a real shame. During our shootout, the more we played the good copies, the more we appreciated the music these guys were making. They were swinging, a big group of top quality players totally in the groove. When it’s played well, and the sound is as good as it is here, there’s nothing boring about these Big Band Jazz Classics. The music works. It swings. If you like the kind of big band recordings Basie made — and who doesn’t — you will find much to like here.

What to Listen For

No matter what copy you have, when you play it notice how the brass in the center of the soundfiield sounds so different from the brass on either side, where, obviously, closer mics allow their solos to be picked up and mixed more easily. There are lovely trumpet solos in the left channel and a baritone sax solo in the right that have amazingly realistic fidelity. Close your eyes and those instruments are RIGHT THERE.

One thing Sheffield got right is tonally-correct, hi-fidelity brass in a real acoustic space. (The latter is where For Duke fails so miserably, although no one ever seems to notice or bother to write about it. To me that dead acoustic is like fingernails on a blackboard, completely inappropriate to the sound.)

What to Watch Out For

As a rule two areas are especially lacking: there is a noticeable lack of presence on most copies, causing the brass to get stuck in the speakers and lose its bite; and, every bit as bad, the sound is often just plain compressed, lacking energy and life.

The musicians on most copies just don’t seem to be giving it their all.

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Dave Mason – Dave Mason Is Alive

More of the Music of Dave Mason

  • Dave Mason Is Alive makes its Hot Stamper debut with solid Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER throughout this early Blue Thumb pressing
  • The bottom end is strong and solid, the tonality is balanced and natural and there’s real openness and transparency up top
  • Richness, warmth, Tubey Magic, and clarity are important to the sound, and here you will find plenty of all four

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U2 – Boy (UK)

More Rock and Pop

  • You’ll find solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them throughout this early UK Island label pressing of Boy
  • Note that the best of the UK pressings, though dramatically better than the wrong domestic LPs, were not competitive with the better domestic pressings of the album
  • The sound on side one is big, open, rich, full-bodied and spacious, with the performers front and center (as well as left and right), and side two is not far behind in all those areas
  • 4 stars: “From the outset, U2 went for the big message – every song on their debut album Boy sounds huge, with oceans of processed guitars cascading around Bono’s impassioned wail. It was an inspired combination of large, stadium-rock beats and post-punk textures.”

Recordings from the 80s are always a bit tricky in terms of sound quality, and U2 is not a band we have ever associated with the highest audiophile-quality sonics. We’ve been through quite a number of their albums now, including War, The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree.

While Demo Disc sound may never be in the cards for these guys, over the years we’ve stumbled upon (stumbling being the only way to go about it) pressings that are much better at communicating their music than others, and certainly a great deal better than any Heavy Vinyl reissue or digital source.

It’s not often that we come across audiophile-quality sound for U2’s early titles. The average copy of this record sounds as dry and flat as a cassette. Not this one, or to be more precise, not this pressing.

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The Band – The Last Waltz

More Roots Rock LPs

  • The Last Waltz, here with seriously good Double Plus (A++) sound or close to it on all SIX sides of these vintage Palm Tree pressings
  • Sides two, three, four, five and six are rich, dynamic and natural sounding, with low end weight, midrange smoothness and powerful, punchy bass, and side one is not far behind in all those areas
  • Features an A-list of brilliant artists, including Van Morrison, Ringo Star, Joni Mitchell, and Muddy Waters, just to name a few, and it’s surely the reason that this record is so hard to find and so expensive when you do find it
  • 4 stars: “It’s the Band’s ‘special guests’ who really make this set stand out — Muddy Waters’ ferocious version of ‘Mannish Boy’ would have been a wonder from a man half his age, Van Morrison sounds positively joyous on ‘Caravan,’ Neil Young and Joni Mitchell do well for their Canadian brethren, and Bob Dylan’s closing set finds him in admirably loose and rollicking form.”
  • If you’re a fan of The Band, and what audiophile wouldn’t be?, this triple album from 1978 belongs in your collection

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The B-52s / Wild Planet

More New Wave Rock

  • Wild Planet returns to the site for the first time in years, here with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them throughout this vintage Warner Bros. pressing – remarkably quiet vinyl too
  • The sound is lively, punchy, and powerful – with all due respect, it should murder whatever copies you may have
  • Both of these sides are bigger and richer than practically all of what we played, and they also have more vocal presence and hard-rockin’ energy, two qualities that we found to be key to the best sounding pressings
  • 4 1/2 stars: “While Wild Planet is not the rarefied wonder their first platter is, it’s still darn good. The best songs here are ‘Private Idaho,’ a wonderfully jittery number that employs a variant on the famous melodic snippet from the Twilight Zone theme music, and ‘Devil in My Car,’ a delightfully loopy hoot that lays the craziness on very thickly.”

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Scooped and Weird – Can That Really Be the Right Sound for Neil’s Debut?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

Many years ago we thought the early pressings of Neil Young’s first album, the ones using the original mix, had the best sound.

We realized — eventually — that we were way off the mark about that and took the time to write a couple of commentaries about that awful mix, explaining just how wrong we were.

However, the right mix only gets you so far. There are dozens of different pressings of this album, and most of them are not very good sounding. In our Hot Stamper listings we note as much:

The sound of the typical pressing leaves a lot to be desired. You get copies where Neil’s voice is so forward that it quickly becomes fatiguing and unpleasant. Many later pressings are just the opposite — Neil’s voice is so muffled he’s practically underwater, probably because those pressings are made from copy tapes of compromised fidelity.

It’s the rare copy that puts him in the right place, and even then there are still plenty of ways in which a copy can fall well short of the best.

We played a copy from the shootout pressed on the later tan label that turned out to be a real mess. Nothing else in our shootout sounded quite like it, and that’s a good thing.

It was just bizarre:

  • Scooped and weird
  • No upper mids but scratchy highs

Can you imagine playing a copy this wrong and thinking you were hearing the sound that Neil had recorded? That was Reprise in the mid-seventies — they could not have cared less what the old titles they were stamping out sounded like. Why should they? There wasn’t any money in it and customers didn’t seem to mind.

If it’s all about the music, as some mistaken audiophiles will tell you to this day, what on earth does sound quality have to do with it anyway? (Keep in mind this was long before the advent of the CD. If you wanted to buy a new copy of the album, it was a crappy reissue LP or a cassette. Your poison awaits.)

And it gets worse. Practically every reissue produced after 1975 was every bit as bad. Here’s a typical Winchester pressing that somehow made it into the shootout, probably as a matter of curiosity:

It would be hard to judge which of these two awful pressings had the worst sound. I suppose with the right tone controls, assuming your premap has such things, you could try to fix the WW pressing. The earlier pressing strikes me as a lost cause. (To get a better feel for what we mean by scooped-out mids, here’s a good example, a record that some audiophiles actually have in their collections, hard as that may be to believe.)

It took us a long time to figure out which pressings had the right sound for this music. If you want to go down that lonesome road, the one thing I can tell you is that you definitely have your work cut out for you. Good luck though. If you stick with it, you will surely learn a lot, even if you end up with a pressing that doesn’t sound remotely as good as the ones we sell.

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Mussorgsky & Ravel – Pictures at an Exhibition

More of the Music of Mussorgsky

  • With a STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side two mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side one, this British EMI import pressing is doing practically everything right
  • Our favorite performance by far, with big, bold and powerful sonics like no other recording we know
  • The brass clarity, the dynamics, the deep bass and the sheer power of the orchestra are almost hard to believe
  • No vintage recording of these works compares with Muti’s – and Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite is an extra special added bonus on side two
  • There are about 150 orchestral recordings we’ve awarded the honor of offering the best performances with the highest quality sound, and this record certainly deserve a place on that list.
  • If you like orchestral spectaculars, have we got amazing sounding records for you

As this is my All Time Favorite performance of Pictures, this record naturally comes very highly recommended. Pictures is a piece of music that has been recorded countless times, and I’ve played scores of different recordings, but the only one that truly satisfies is this one, Muti’s 1979 recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Much like Previn and the LSO’s performance of The Planets, he finds the music in the work that no one else seems to.

A Must Own Classical Record

This orchestral spectacular should be part of any serious Classical Collection. Other Must Own classical recordings can be found here.

For his 1979 review of the Mussorgsky, Robert Layton in the GRAMOPHONE writes of Muti and The Philadelphia Orchestra :

…what orchestral playing they offer us. The lower strings in ‘Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle’ have an extraordinary richness, body and presence, and “Baba Yaga”, which opens the second side, has an unsurpassed virtuosity and attack as well as being of demonstration standard as a recording. The glorious body of tone, the richly glowing colours, the sheer homogeneity of the strings and perfection of the ensemble is a constant source of pleasure.

Of the performance of Stravinsky’s Firebird, Layton writes:

…Muti’s reading is second to none and the orchestral playing is altogether breathtaking. The recording is amazingly lifelike and truthful.

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Harry Nilsson / Nilsson Schmilsson – The Robed Man’s Masterpiece

More of the Music of Harry Nilsson

  • Solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER brings Harry Nilsson’s indisputable Masterpiece of Bent Rock to life on this vintage copy
  • Both sides are remarkably good sounding, thanks to the brilliant engineering skills of Phill (That’s Two L’s) Brown
  • A Better Records favorite (we give it Five Stars) that really comes to life on a superb pressing such as this one
  • Problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • 4 1/2 stars: “…it’s a near-perfect summary of everything Nilsson could do; he could be craftier and stranger, but never did he achieve the perfect balance as he did here.”
  • If I were to compile a list of my favorite rock and pop albums from 1971, this album would definitely be on it

Big production pop like this is hard to pull off. Harry did an amazing job, but the recording is not perfect judging by the dozen or so copies we played during our most recent shootout, and the scores w’ve suffered through before. Let’s face it: “Jump Into The Fire” will never be smooth and sweet; neither will “Down” on side one. But other tracks on this album have Demo Disc sound.

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Night Moves – MoFi Reviewed

Hot Stamper Pressings of Classic Rock Albums Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and another MoFi LP reviewed and found to be tonally way off the mark.

The last time I played a copy of the MoFi pressing I could not believe how ridiculously bright it was.  

It’s interesting to note that some of the brightest records this atrocious label ever released came out about the same time as this one.

Aja is number 033

Night Moves is number 034.

Tea for the Tillerman is number 035

Are you seeing a pattern here?

Three dogs in a row, all suffering from the same problem: they’re way too bright.

Did MoFi buy some dull studio monitors right before they mastered these awful pressings?

Did a tweeter or two blow and no one noticed?

Did Stan Ricker have wax buildup in his ears?

What could account for records that are bright enough to peel the paint?

Some mysteries will never be solved, and I would bet this is one of them.

But really, what difference does it make? We should all know to avoid this company’s products by now, and that includes all three eras of records produced by this label:

That should pretty much cover it.

Never buy any record on this label (except the one we sell) if you are interested in top quality sound, and if you own any, get rid of them and replace them with records that actually sound good (like the ones we sell).

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